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Rebecca Gladstone

@becctococcus.bsky.social

Bioinformatician, microbial genomics, πŸ€“ πŸ’™ Pneumo, E. coli, capsules, AMR, vaccine evaluation and general adventure seeker living in Norway.

661 Followers  |  582 Following  |  7 Posts  |  Joined: 22.11.2024  |  1.4353

Latest posts by becctococcus.bsky.social on Bluesky

And special thanks to Handal and Kaspersen et al. (doi.org/10.1093/jac/...) for sharing their AST data to serve as a UTI validation set for this genomic dataset.

20.01.2026 09:49 β€” πŸ‘ 0    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0

It's still largely infeasible for national genomic surveillance at the scale AST data is available (here 24,866 BSI and 28,639 UTI E. coli, 2006–2021), but combining existing 3254 BSI genomes and AST data allowed us to estimate the importance of this notorious MDR clone in Norwegian UTIs.

20.01.2026 09:49 β€” πŸ‘ 0    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0

This was a really fun study in collaboration with Theodor A. Ross and colleagues @uitnorgesarktiske.bsky.social @sfi-vi.bsky.social, training a model to predict the ST131-C genotype from antimicrobial susceptibility testing data, providing insight into its UTI prevalence and context for BSI trends.

20.01.2026 09:49 β€” πŸ‘ 1    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0

"Machine learning-based lineage prediction from antimicrobial susceptibility testing phenotypes for Escherichia coli sequence type 131 clade C surveillance across infection types" Spoiler: the MDR ST131-C is pervasive in UTIs, underlying BSI trends. doi.org/10.1099/mgen... @microbiologysociety.org

20.01.2026 09:49 β€” πŸ‘ 4    πŸ” 6    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0
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Co-evolution between colibactin production and resistance is linked to clonal expansions in Escherichia coli Specific strains of Escherichia coli employ the polyketide synthase island to produce a metabolite called colibactin that is implicated in colorectal tumorigenesis via its genotoxic effect on human DN...

New preprint: we looked into production of the bacterial toxin colibactin and found that MDR E. coli from the global north have co-evolved with endemic colibactin producers, acquiring colibactin resistance genes before undergoing clonal expansions.

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

18.11.2025 06:41 β€” πŸ‘ 24    πŸ” 10    πŸ’¬ 2    πŸ“Œ 0
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Pre- and postantibiotic epoch: The historical spread of antimicrobial resistance Plasmids are now the primary vectors of antimicrobial resistance, but our understanding of how human industrialisation of antibiotics influenced their evolution is limited by a paucity of data predati...

Imagine we could travel back in time βͺβŒ›οΈto explore the world of bacterial pathogens before humans discovered and industrialised antibiotics

We just did that to study the history of #AMR spread @science.org
doi.org/10.1126/scie...

If you like time travel & biology, this 🧡is for youπŸ‘‡

06.10.2025 10:41 β€” πŸ‘ 78    πŸ” 35    πŸ’¬ 3    πŸ“Œ 1
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Genomic constraints shape the evolution of alternative routes to drug resistance in prokaryotes Background Variation within the prokaryotic pangenome is not random, and natural selection that favours particular combinations of genes appears to dominate over random drift. What is less clear is wh...

New preprint reveals bacteria can't just collect all resistance genes like Pokemon cards.
We found mutually exclusive evolutionary pathways to multidrug resistance in E. coli & P. aeruginosa - some resistance mechanisms actively prevent others from coexisting www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

29.08.2025 14:05 β€” πŸ‘ 165    πŸ” 77    πŸ’¬ 4    πŸ“Œ 5

Being able to data plasmid acquisition, and to see the diversity of plasmids being gained and lost from lineages, was really eye opening! It was a pleasure to contribute my tiny bit to this huge paper and the data has so much more to give! @arredondo.bsky.social @gerrythill.bsky.social et al.

03.04.2025 11:34 β€” πŸ‘ 22    πŸ” 7    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0

Fantastic! Can you add @themaklin.bsky.social too?

10.01.2025 11:39 β€” πŸ‘ 1    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0

I'm putting together a Microbial Bioinformatics starter pack to help get everyone connected in our community. Let me know if there are any bluesky users to be added and share so that twitter refugees can tune back in to the fantastic world microbes go.bsky.app/3ezLo7e

10.01.2025 09:38 β€” πŸ‘ 107    πŸ” 60    πŸ’¬ 27    πŸ“Œ 0

We are hiring remote bioinformaticians at @theiagen . If you have a passion for microbial bioinformatics or public health, send your CV to careers@theiagen.com . You can be based nearly anywhere but need to be available to work US business hours.

05.12.2024 14:46 β€” πŸ‘ 17    πŸ” 9    πŸ’¬ 2    πŸ“Œ 0
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RTs much appreciated... would love to reach both AMR and biomath folks!
"Evolutionary accumulation modelling in AMR: machine learning to infer and predict evolutionary dynamics of multi-drug resistance"
arxiv.org/abs/2411.00219
We think EvAM methods have some potential in AMR. 🧡

29.11.2024 07:03 β€” πŸ‘ 10    πŸ” 5    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 1

Interesting and useful post from Altmetric.

TDLR:

πŸŽ‰ BlueSky is an awesome place to share research.

❌ Don’t use link shorteners (unless it’s the DOI one)

βœ… Keep the link in the post (don’t remove it once you have the auto-preview)

#AcademicSky #PhDSky

05.12.2024 07:42 β€” πŸ‘ 55    πŸ” 23    πŸ’¬ 2    πŸ“Œ 1
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Geographical variation in the incidence of colorectal cancer and urinary tract cancer is associated with population exposure to colibactin-producing Escherichia coli Biomedical research has implicated the bacterial metabolite colibactin as a causal risk factor for several cancer types, in particular, colorectal can…

New paper:

We show that population exposure to colibactin producing E. coli lineages ST95 and ST73 largely explains global variation in colorectal cancer incidence. Same STs are also major causes of UTIs and may be similarly involved in urinary tract cancers.

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

05.12.2024 09:04 β€” πŸ‘ 84    πŸ” 49    πŸ’¬ 5    πŸ“Œ 6
Group 2 and 3 ABC-transporter dependant capsular K-loci contribute significantly to variation in the invasive potential of Escherichia coli The major opportunistic pathogen Escherichia coli is the largest cause of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) associated infections and deaths globally. Considerable antigenic diversity has been documented...

How invasive are different E .coli capsules and how many are there? Find out here and use the group 2 and 3 database to type your own!
medrxiv.org/cgi/content/...

27.11.2024 02:44 β€” πŸ‘ 25    πŸ” 10    πŸ’¬ 2    πŸ“Œ 0

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